"Who was in the room next to Jessica Lynch?" A Gut-wrenching Report....

[KoKo]

(Reposted for those who missed this article when it came out. Since Jessica's story is all over the place this week, it helps to have some more background on this.) Remember the Iraqi family who's car was shot up and their children were killed accidentally at the beginning of the conflict?) That horrible image of the mother and father holding their dead and injured little girls?
This is what happened to them......at least according to this report from the Guardian.

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Who was in the room next to Jessica Lynch?

From TomDispatch.com: Award-winning foreign correspondent Ed Vulliamy
finds stories of ordinary Iraqi civilians. This excerpt from a 2-part article tells
one story: the family in the hospital down the hall from Jessica Lynch.


Iraq: The Human Toll
by Ed Vuillamy, UK Guardian Observer
July 07, 2003

The southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, where the American ground offensive
began in earnest during the last days of March, will before long be known
not because Nasiriyah was once the cradle of the Sumer dynasty and thus of
civilisation; not because here, 6,000 years ago, the first syllabic alphabet
was devised and first mathematical schema developed (around the figure
60, still the measurement of time). Or because the first legal code -
including laws governing the conduct of war - was written and enforced.

No, Nasiriyah's fame will be enshrined in Hollywood lore because it was here
that US special forces rescued Jessica Lynch, who went astray and was
captured by the Iraqis. None of the major American television networks that
covered the fantasy version of the dramatic rescue (Doctors and staff recall
the episode differently: as the Americans blasted and kicked their way in,
they were welcomed and shown to Private Lynch's ward, with no resistance
offered) bothered to visit a few doors down from Jessica's. In there lie
Daham Kassim, aged 46, and his 37-year-old wife Gufran Ibed Kassim.
Daham has his arms bound, and a stump where his right leg used to be.
Gufran will probably never again move her arms, wounded by gunshots.

Kassim speaks in English, an educated man and, until a few months ago,
director of the Southeastern electricity board. His torment began 24 March,
when - after heavy US bombing in his neighbourhood - Kassim decided the
family would leave Nasiriyah for the safety of his parents' farm 70 miles
away.
http://peacefuljustice.caltech.edu/0728/4.shtml

[kimchi]

1. Thank you for posting this.

It just breaks my heart all over again.

Putting civilians out in the cold after killing their kids and shooting them up. I just don't get it.

[Brotherjohn]

2. You have somehow managed to fill me with a more intense disgust...

...for the Bush administration.

Even if this is not exactly what happened to them after, whether they were in the same ward as Lynch is irrelevant. It is fact that a man and his wife watched their entire family, including several small children, die brutal, horrible deaths. And this scenario was likely repeated hundreds of times in the last few months in Iraq.

I do not fault the soldiers. They are kids themselves being put in an untenable situation by this administration. But with no valid justification for this war, and horrific accidents like this occurring throughout the conflict, it will only get worse.

The costs of war are unimaginably horrible, but Bush just seems incapable of seeing them. Bush supporters would inevitably reply that the deaths we cause are far outweighed by the ones we saved by "liberating" Iraq. But there is no evidence that this is true, as the deaths continue and we continue to create mortal enemies on a daily basis, on a worldwide scale. The decision to go to war has always been a complicated one, requiring that all of the potential benefits be weighed against all of the consequences, intentional or unintentional. If it were a simple case of freeing a people from a dictatorship, there would be no more dictators on the planet. But it is not that simple.

Bush has horribly miscalculated, and rashly went to war when it was not necessary. Perhaps the single most important quality in a president is the ability to wisely make that decision. Bush has failed that test miserably.

[cosmicdot]

3. Ed Vuillamy is a journalist ... and, in the US, there's Kathleen Parker

... and the other tools of the corporate state ...

'What for? For oil and a strategic place for America? Why did they put my Zainab out into the cold? I tell you Mister, she died of cold, she died of cold.' He asks us to have her buried 'with her brother and sisters. Please, Mister, I cannot move; you must go and ask how we can take my Zainab to Najaf.'